Friday, 23 March 2012

“You’ve got to be on your best behaviour,”
Grandmother had warned. “I’m not going to put up with any mischief.”

She was a formidable old lady, ramrod-straight
and with a face so stern that Jack and Jill were terrified of her. It was perhaps,
as Mother had said, remarkably kind of her to take them to the unicorn races, but
Jack and Jill had had the feeling that it would be more trouble than fun for
them, especially since they had been washed and brushed and made to put on
their very best clothes, which they both hated intensely.

All the way to the racetrack, Grandmother
lectured the twins on correct deportment and behaviour, and their spirits sank
lower and lower. They even wished they’d contracted the ‘flu going round among
the other children in their class, so they’d have got out of this.

Their depression lifted, though, when they saw the racetrack. It was a riot of
colours, with women in funny hats who talked animatedly among themselves, and
men in flat caps and coats with leather patches on their elbows who made hand signals
to each other.

“Stay close to my side,” Grandmother said. “I’ll
get a list of the runners for the next race and...”

Jack and Jill forgot to listen to what she
was saying next, because they were so busy watching the unicorns walk out on
the track before being taken to the starting gates. They were gorgeous, each
with its long horn covered in a blunt-tipped sheath in the animal’s owner’s
colours, green and golden, silver and blue, red and burgundy. The prepubescent jockeys,
looking tiny even next to their small mounts, were as flamboyantly clad, and
waved their riding crops in salute to the crowd.

“It’s a race for two-year-old mares,”
Grandmother said, reading from the list. “Now let’s see which one has the best
odds...”

“Look at that one,” Jack said, pointing at a high-stepping black unicorn with a purple and yellow striped sheath on her
horn. “She’s gorgeous.”

“Ooh, yes,” Jill agreed. “I’m sure she’ll
win. Grandma? Do you think that one there will win?”

Frowning, Grandmother looked up from the
paper and peered down at the track. The unicorn wore the number 19 on her
saddlecloth, and Grandmother’s long finger hovered over the list, looking for
the name against her number. Going up on tiptoe, Jill looked over her shoulder,
and pointed.

For some reason, Grandmother went red and
her mouth set in a grim line. “Certainly not,” she huffed. “It’s a very
improper name. You mustn’t ever repeat names like that. Besides, number
nineteen’s got the worst odds in the field. The animal hasn’t a chance.”

“Oh, but, Grandma,” Jack protested. “Just
look at that lovely long horn she’s got.” But Grandmother had turned away, her
back stiff with disapproval.

“She’s silly,”
Jack muttered, as soon as Grandmother was safely out of earshot. “I’m sure
Horny Lady will win.”

“What’s that, young man?” someone asked. It
was one of the men with flat caps and leather patches on the elbows of their
coats. He smiled at Jack and bowed slightly at Jill. “You want to put a bet on
Horny Lady?”

“Uh,” said Jack uncertainly. “I’m not sure
what...”

“We do,” Jill said, stepping in decisively.
“What do we have to do to put a bet?”

“Nothing simpler, young lady,” the man
said, grinning. His teeth were stained brown, just the way Jack and Jill had
been warned their teeth would get if they didn’t brush properly. “How much
money do you want to bet?”

Now it was Jill’s turn to look unsure. “I
don’t know,” she said. “How much do you think we should bet?”

“Well,” said the man, “how much do you
have?” He watched as the twins searched their pockets and took out all the
money they had. “That will do,” he said. “At a hundred to one odds, which is
what Horny Lady has, you stand to win a hundred times that amount if she wins.”

If Jack and Jill had wanted to say
something, they fell silent quickly, because Grandmother was making her way
back to them from the betting counters. She looked grimly at the flat-capped
man and took her seat beside the twins, holding her race sheet rolled up like a baton.

“Now then,” she ordered, “when the race
starts, cheer for Lucky Lucky Lee as loudly as you can.” An instant later, far
off down the track, the traps sprung open and the unicorns dashed out.

Neither Jack nor Jill could make out which
animal was which, because except for one or two trailing far off at the back,
they were all bunched up together. As they came round the near bend, they were
a smear of colour and movement, flashing hooves and jockeys bent low over their
necks. “There’s Horny Lady,” Jack yelled in Jill’s ear, pointing at a black
unicorn in the middle of the pack. But, actually, it was impossible to tell.

By the time the unicorns had come round the
second time, the field had spread out a lot. Of the eight unicorns, only three
were now in the first bunch, and Jack and Jill managed to see clearly that
number nineteen was one of them.

Again the unicorns were coming round the
far bend, and this time there was no doubt – Lucky Lucky Lee and Horny Lady
were running together out in front of the rest of the field, the black unicorn
running like the wind but still only just managing to keep up with her
red-and-silver clad competitor. The finish line was just in front of the twins’
and Grandmother’s seats, and as the two unicorns flashed past in a storm of
hooves and waving tails, there was a great cheer from the spectators. Lucky
Lucky Lee had won!

“Too bad,” the flat-capped man said,
grinning with his stained teeth. “If only your Horny Lady had been a bit
faster, you’d have earned such a lot. As it happens, unfortunately...”

“What’s that?” Grandmother, who’d been in
the act of getting up from her seat, turned, staring. “Have you two been
placing bets with this bookie?”

The twins were too shattered at their loss
to do more than nod miserably.

“How much?” Grandmother asked. “How much
did you bet?”

Jill told her.

“You ought to be ashamed of yourself,”
Grandmother began to the flat-capped man, in a low voice that sounded almost
pleasant to those who didn’t know her. “A grown man like you, taking advantage of
two innocent children. You should give back their money at once. Do you hear?”

“But, ma’am,” the man said, still grinning,
“they made the bet fair and square, and lost. That’s the rule, isn’t it?
Besides, you won on Lucky Lucky Lee, didn’t you? Would you have given up your winnings in my place?”

Grandmother looked stricken, suddenly. “I’d
better go collect my winnings,” she began, when there was an announcement on
the loudspeaker. There had been an objection, and a review of the film of the
race. Number Nineteen had got the tip of her horn over the finish line before
the other unicorn. Horny Lady had won!

“Ah, well,” said the flat-capped man
pleasantly, edging away. “I’ll be off then.”

“No, you won’t.” The light of battle was in
Grandmother’s eyes, and she advanced like a battleship, the rolled paper thrust
out like a cannon. “You’re going to pay what you owe them, and you’re going to
pay now.”

It was no contest. The flat-capped man had
never encountered someone like Grandmother before. The grin was more like a
rictus frozen on his face as he counted out the money.

“We’d better be going home now,”
Grandmother told the twins. “No telling what mischief you’ll be up to if we
stay for the next race.”

In the taxi on the way back home,
Grandmother was silent a long time. Then, suddenly, she smiled.

Statutory
Disclaimer: This article is a statement of my
beliefs and the result of my research and writing. The sources I have drawn
from are indicated at the conclusion of this article and are available on the
internet for independent consultation. I am not in any way responsible for any
fights, disagreements, quarrels or fallings-out arising as a result of
discussions of this article on any media on which it, or reference to it, may
appear. Thank you.

“This soldier,” Vern Kimmit from Orlando, Florida, wrote, “probably
prevented dozens if not hundreds of future terrorist attacks, singlehandedly
and on his own initiative. Nice shooting son, I just popped open an icy cold
Sam Adams in your honor (sic)!”

This comment was made in the response
columns of an article [1] about the celebrated massacre near Kandahar,
where sixteen Afghan civilians (including nine children and three women) were
murdered in their beds by American occupation forces (whether in the form of a
single soldier or a group of them). It was also far from the only comment of
this sort – that article, and others on the same topic, are virtually crawling
with them. With one more exception, from the same article, I don’t intend to
post a selection; the reader can, if interested, check them out for himself or
herself. I’d recommend a strong stomach.

Before we go any further, let me declare
the names of these dead and injured Afghans, since otherwise, as we shall
discuss, nobody will ever get to know of them. They are [2]:

These nameless, faceless, Afghan civilians
had names, and faces, and lives, and deserve to have those names, faces and
lives recorded. But, to an amazing extent, those names, faces and lives have not been recorded. I could barely find another
mention of these people anywhere.

And that
is what’s so significant. Why is it that those Afghans remain nameless and
faceless?

In the course of this article, I shall mention
the actual massacre only as a means of discussing this larger question: the
reason why the “reactions” focus almost exclusively on the perpetrator/s, not
the dead and injured. Since this is far from the first massacre of Afghan civilians
by occupation forces, and is likely to be far from the last, the massacre
itself is less interesting than the reaction.

Of course, in order to understand the
reaction, we need to talk a little bit about the massacre itself.

Since most readers of this article will
already be in cognisance of the “facts” (insofar as such a constantly shifting
tale [3] can be termed to contain any facts whatsoever) I’ll just go
over them quickly: that at or about 0200 on the 11th of March 2012,
one or more American soldiers from a base near Kandahar went to two separate
villages, where they murdered sixteen Afghan civilians in their homes
(including eleven from a single family), and burned their bodies with some kind
of inflammable liquid. A few days later, it turned out that the alleged “lone
gunman” who had perpetrated the massacre had “turned himself in” on his return
to base and was quickly removed from the country, being sent to Kuwait, and
when that nation was unhappy with this, to the US itself.

From the beginning, the “lone shooter”
theory did not stand up to even casual, let alone serious, analysis. The
survivors of the massacre, and other villagers, were unanimous in claiming that
there had been “several” soldiers involved, and that one person could not
possibly have done all that the killer had been accused of doing [4].
Even though the story had so many holes that nobody in any other circumstances
would have taken it seriously, there was an incredible and concerted effort, apparently,
in the mainstream media to believe it – to the extent that it’s standard now to
read of “an American serviceman” who had “carried out the shootings”. And it’s only
natural to wonder why.

As the first days went past, the identity
of this “serviceman” was kept secret, to the extent that some of the
aforementioned respondents began wondering aloud what the reason for this might
be. As one Pookie Sue from Davenport, Iowa said [1]

If
the shooter was a white Christian, we would know his name, see his picture, and
hear all about him. Who is the shooter? Why is it being kept quiet?... Evidently
he is black or a Muslim.

Unfortunately for such people, the identity
of the “sole gunman” was later revealed to be a Staff Sergeant Robert Bales, a
white Christian who immediately became a subject of overt or implied sympathy.
He was on his fourth deployment in a war zone, he’d had part of a foot
amputated, he’d suffered possible brain damage in a car crash, he’d been suffering
marital problems, he’d seen a friend have a leg blown off by an Improvised
Explosive Device (IED; a fancy term for a homemade landmine) only a day or two
before, and as his friends said, he was a “nice guy”, a husband and father. Not
someone who was really to blame – if there was any blame, it lay elsewhere. Where, nobody seemed to be
clear; on the (black, Muslim, Kenyan) President, on the (evil, raghead)
Taliban, on “society” – but elsewhere.

Then, things became murkier, as Bales’
personal history came seeping out. He was, it appeared, less of an angel than
at first appeared. He had defrauded an investor of over a million dollars, had
been involved in an assault on a former girlfriend, and had taken part in at
least one massacre in Najaf, Iraq – meaning he was likely a war criminal as
well [5].

Now, can you think of a better candidate for
a “fall guy” to take the blame? He is either a stressed-out victim of circumstances,
not really in control of his own actions; or he’s an intrinsically evil person,
who should have been locked up long ago and the key thrown away. Either way, he
is the perfect scapegoat – leaving the
rest of his colleagues blameless and still eminently worthy of worship.

Worship, did I say? Isn’t that too strong a word?

Not at all; and it’s in the extent to which
soldier-worship has become a part of modern Western discourse that the key to
the puzzle lies.

Rewind a moment, to the war in Vietnam.
Back in those long-ago days, when the smell of napalm hung in the air over the
rice paddies, US soldiers had fought and died in another war against a
faceless, invisible enemy. There had been massacres there, too, and crazed
soldiers running amok, and “free fire zones” where any Vietnamese was fair
game. But there were differences – important differences.

In Vietnam, a large majority of the
American soldiers in that war were conscripts. These young men, who had been
forced into uniform because they could not get student deferments and whose
only other options were jail or hiding in Canada, had been sent off into a
never-ending war they didn’t understand in a nation they couldn’t find on a map.
And when they returned, they came back to find themselves reviled as “baby
killers” and worse, by those (as they saw it) with the money and connections to
escape the draft that had swallowed them. And, of course, most importantly, the
US ended on the losing side in Vietnam.

Today, a different narrative has been quite
deliberately created – the narrative of the Heroic Soldier, protecting the
Homeland from the Freedom-hating Evildoer. In Afghanistan, Iraq, and everywhere
on the planet Earth that the American Soldier treads, he’s now no longer a
baby-killer; he’s a torch-bearer of freedom, fighting for what used to be
called Truth, Justice and the American Way but now goes by the name of Freedom
and Democracy. It’s fed by everything from bumper stickers to yellow ribbons,
and the myth is as assiduously cultivated as the military-industrial-political
multiplex (MIP) is protected and encouraged. Of course, this Heroic Soldier is
not, on the surface of it at least, an embittered draftee who couldn’t get out
of serving his time; he’s a volunteer who put his life on the line for freedom.
The fact that the average military volunteer worldwide has – after the Great
War, at all events – been a victim of the poverty draft, joining the military
because he has no other option, is neither here nor there in that narrative.
Whereas the murderous Vietnam War American soldier was One of Them, the heroic
American soldier of today is emphatically One of Us.

Obviously, the Heroic Soldier cannot be allowed to lose - he has to be supported through thick and thin, at the cost of everything else. The blood he spills is sacred; the sacrifices he makes cannot be allowed to go in vain.

And this is exactly why the media

... was
quick to follow the lead of "U.S. military officials" who
"stressed that the shooting was carried out by a lone, rogue soldier,
differentiating it from past instances in which civilians were killed
accidentally during military operations." [6]

Even if one ignores the canard that
civilians were killed “accidentally” – the recent history of Afghanistan and
Iraq is rife with instances [7] in which civilians were not just
killed deliberately but with malice aforethought, as sport – the “officials”,
one ought to note, “stressed” that the shooting was carried out by a lone,
rogue soldier; meaning, a soldier not under control, and whose actions were not
therefore the responsibility of the army which employed, armed, and deployed
him.

This, therefore, kills two birds with one
stone. For the civilian at home, who has no direct stake in the conflict on the
other side of the planet, but whose finances may be suffering from the
diversion of money to the Endless War, it provides reassurance; a monstrous act
may have been committed, but it was the fault of a lone, out-of-control
trooper. It’s possible he was too PTSD’d out to know what he was doing, in
which case he needs counselling, not jail. Possibly this provides a bit of
cognitive dissonance, because the particular civilian may also be one of those
who rail against “liberals” who “mollycoddle” criminals and ignore their
victims. But then, he or she can slip easily into the second thread of the
narrative; the killer was a vile man, someone who could strip an elderly person
of a million and a half dollars and then run for safety into the army. Either
way, the suffering the individual civilian, or his family or friends, is
enduring isn’t in vain, because it’s a lone bad apple and not the military as a
whole.

And for the military, it gives another kind
of comfort – it’s not another massacre by an out-of-control group, like the one
at Haditha, or the Kill Team, or, earlier, at the unforgettable incident at Mai
Lai. Since it’s a single soldier, and “such things happen”, there’s no
particular need to do anything about it; the military’s carefully constructed
mythology of the Heroic Soldier is not at stake, nor does there have to be any
actual action taken on the ground to prevent anything of the like from
happening in future. And, as a corollary, the Afghan “government’s” demands to
withdraw these troops from villages is not justified, and cannot be agreed to.

In both these cases, it should be noticed,
the essential narrative needs to suppress the individuality of the victims.
Dead Afghans with names, faces, hopes and lives need to be mourned, and their
deaths cry out for justice. Dead Afghans without names or faces are just
numbers; nobody really cares about
them, even when they say they do. And that slots in with the idea that uncivilised
Afghans don’t really mind dying; it
isn’t that much to them, since “human life is cheap” there. [8]

A legitimate question can be asked at this
point – what about the likes of Mr Vern Kimmit of Orlando, Florida, with whose
quote I began this article? Where, with their frantic bloodthirstiness, do they
fit in this framework? Aren’t they outside this scenario I have put together?

Answer: no, they aren’t. They are a part of
it, all right.

The likes of Mr Kimmit are a subgroup of
the people who need constant reassurance that everything that’s going on in the
world is someone else’s fault. Like the KONY2012 bandwagon, which provides the believer with an easily hateable figure on whom to blame everything that’s gone
wrong with a part of the world, these people have invested a lot of emotion
into hating the Other – the Evildoing Muslim Terrorist. They need to keep
polishing and buffing up that hate, in order to hold it up so that the
reflected light of it can shine in their eyes and keep them from seeing the
ugly truth. That’s why those of them who do finally admit the fact that one or
more American soldiers can have murdered multiple civilians need to justify
that in terms of that hate. Maybe like Mr Kimmit, they claim those children and
women were future terrorists and therefore better off dead. Maybe, like others,
they seek refuge in claiming that Muslims had killed Americans (in their version of events, no Muslim can be a true American), so this is
nothing but turn and turn about. But it’s just twisting and turning on the hook
– a way of turning their faces away from the hard light of facts.

And what are those facts? The Afghans, from
the start, have not believed the narrative of the single soldier who ran amok,
but then, it can be argued, they have equally compelling reasons not to. But they do add to the holes [3]
in the official story. For example, they point out [9] that days
before the massacre, residents of one of the villages targeted were lined up by
American soldiers from the base and threatened with a massacre in retaliation
for the bombing in which Sgt Bales’ friend “lost his leg”. They note that the massacre
continued for three hours, and that
the base in question had complete surveillance over the area and yet utterly
failed to stop the so-called “lone gunman” [10]. They point out to
all the eyewitness accounts of multiple killers – up to twenty of them, as the chief of staff of the Afghan Army himself declared[11]. In other words, they tell what seems to be a far
more believable version of the truth. And to them, flying out the accused
killer is all the proof they need that a cover-up is in the works; he’s been
taken where he can’t be confronted by witnesses or be subject to a court which
isn’t predisposed to believe in the official narrative. Also, going by the fact
that earlier cases where American troops were accused (and convicted) of murder
and yet got off virtually scot free [12], they have no reason to believe
that justice will be done in this case either.

But, of course, the official narrative isn’t
meant to convince the Afghans, like
the man who lost eleven members of his family and has only one son left alive [13].
As I believe I’ve made clear in the course of this article, it’s meant for
domestic consumption only, to
reassure the people at home that the Heroic Soldier is still a hero, and that
the war is still worth fighting, at a time when an increasing majority of the
people feel it is not [14]. The Afghans are much more likely to
react by joining the insurgency in larger numbers, but they were doing that anyway.

Supposing, therefore, that the massacre was carried out by a group of soldiers, what might their motivation have been? As far as I can see, it comes down to one of two likely possibilities, with a third as a remote chance:

First, and most likely, that the massacre was carried out by a group of soldiers (with or without the knowledge of the rest of the base, but the lack of any effort to stop the massacre indicates that it happened with the knowledge and approval of someone in a position to give orders) in order to "teach the Afghans a lesson". The burning of the corpses - obviously the shooter/s carried inflammable liquid with malice aforethought - can only be interpreted as a clumsy attempt to cover up the evidence, and supports this idea.

Second, and a little less probably, that it was a "night raid" that went wrong [15]. These "night raids" are, after drones, the lynchpin of the Occupation's anti-insurgent strategy, and consists of attacking the houses of anyone who is even suspected of being sympathetic to the resistance. Said thought crime is punished by summary execution without trial, and is extremely deeply resented by the Afghans - so much so that even the puppet "President" of Afghanistan, Hamid Karzai, has demanded that they be stopped. It's certainly not impossible that a group of soldiers sent on a mission to murder suspected Taliban sympathisers ran amok and killed civilians. However, the obviously premeditated attempts to burn the corpses go against this theory. The Occupation normally makes no attempt to cover its tracks where night raids are concerned, because as a terror tactic it makes sense not to cover it up to achieve the maximum impact.

The third and least likely hypothesis is that this was a deliberate action, authorised at the highest levels of the occupation, to try and provoke an Afghan reaction so intense as to provide an excuse to stop the withdrawal of forces as "promised" (if you can believe that) by 2014. However, while the US military commander in Afghanistan, John Allen, has demanded [16] that the "withdrawal" be halted, the NATO vassals are getting out as fast as they can [17] and the Afghan "government" has summoned up the temerity to ask for more control over what happens after 2014 [18]. So, if at all this was a deliberate action, it would seem to have been counterproductive.

Meanwhile...

If I were an Afghan, and if I were to take
the "single person shooter" theory of the massacre seriously, then
I'd have to conclude I was safer
under the Taliban. Could a PTSD'd/deranged/inebriated/brain-damaged (take your
pick) foreign soldier wander through villages for hours, entering houses,
murder people in their beds and burn their bodies, if the Taliban were around?

Wednesday, 21 March 2012

Recently, while looking over my stored
computer files, I came across some older writing. Among these was a poem I
wrote way back in 2004, called The Alleys
of Iraq. Inspired by a Vietnam War-era protest song, The Fields of Vietnam, it took not very much effort to write except
for one particular stanza which I kept revising over and over, until it suddenly
sprang to my mind, full-blown as it were, during my morning jog. (I’ll leave it
to the reader to guess which stanza that was.) I’d posted it online but since
my readership at the time could be counted in single digits, it sank pretty
much without a trace.

Anyway, coming across that poem, I wanted
to see how it had fared with the passage of the years, now that the imperialist
aggression part of the Iraq war is pretty much over and the civil war has
restarted. It does have more than a touch of naiveté – back then, I still believed
that the victory of the Iraqi resistance against the occupation would mark a
return to at least a stable and socialist Iraq, something I’m not dumb enough to
believe of any nation now. Today, if you ask me, I’d say that once the Empire
has “throw(n) a crappy little nation against the wall just to show everyone it means business” (the Ledeen Doctrine) nothing can ever put that nation together again as
it was, no matter who wins. You can’t unbreak an egg. But I was younger back
then, and more idealistic.

Still, I was completely correct in one
thing. Back in 2004, the nascent Iraqi resistance was still finding its feet,
but even then I had predicted that it would be these “insurgents” who would
finally drive out the Empire. And – looking back from today’s viewpoint – can anyone
who thinks of it seriously deny that it was the anonymous Iraqi resistance
fighter (whether a Ba’athist “dead-ender”, Mahdi Army member, or one of the troops
of the various different resistance outfits) who have stopped the Empire in its
tracks? If it were not for the bloodletting it suffered in the towns and
deserts of Iraq, wouldn’t the Empire long since have invaded Iran and Syria at
the least, and more likely than not Pakistan as well? But for the Iraqi
resistance, would one be hearing at least some
calls for restraint instead of all-out cheerleading for war on Iran and Syria?
Of course not.

The Iraqi resistance halted the march of Empire. The Afghan resistance will force its retreat and eventual collapse. Whatever their other sins, those things can't be taken away from them, and the world owes them gratitude for that.

So, here’s my eight-year-old tribute to the
Iraqi resistance, exactly as I wrote it then.

THE ALLEYS OF IRAQ

Oh brothers, though we’re strangers and your
land and mine are far apart

And though the differences between us are
numerous and stark

As the needle’s drawn towards the pole, I’m
drawn both heart and soul

To write of your brave struggle in the streets
and alleys of Iraq.

You paid dearly for the mistake your leader was
drawn to make

When for eight long years you fought the armies
of Iran

Those it helped now crush you down, their flag
flutters over town

Desert and river, but not the hearts of the
land of Iraq.

They pushed you their war to suffer and to
fight

To die for their cause, for them to bleed and
to burn

Brother against brother pitted they, and while
the sun shone they made hay

Watered with the blood of the peoples of Iraq
and Iran.

Scarce two years gone, came again the plague

Of war to ravage your great and ancient land

When peace came it didn’t last, this piece of
your colonized past

Called Kuwait painted with blood the soil and
water of Iraq.

They chain you now and talk of morality,
freedom and of democracy

And claim the world is safer that they hold you
down

But then they had said they didn’t care, Kuwait
was none of their affair

Until their bombs rained on the houses and
schools of Iraq.

For over a decade they starved you, bombed you
and murdered you

In the name of weapons they said you had not
disarmed.

When your children died for lack of food, they
said ‘twas for their own good

That they wept and died, they said, these
‘liberators’ of Iraq.

Then came they once more, they said to ‘free’

With bombs, tanks and missiles, your people
from Ba’athist harm

WMDs throughout the country, a terrorist under
every tree

They claimed, and came to ravage the ancient
land of Iraq.

A strange liberation these invaders brought, an
odd democracy

Of death and fire and prison to the people they
said they charmed

While the Zionist entity cheered, they shot and
raped and spurned and speared

Old men, young women, and the children of Iraq.

“We’ll kill you if you raise your head,” these
foreign ‘liberators’ said

“We’ll raise a firestorm if you dare strike a
spark.

The smoke that’s carried on the breeze from the
Tigris to the Euphrates

Will signal the final destruction of the cities
of Iraq.”

They thought it would be easy, their flag would
fly

Over the land and sea, the rivers and the sand

(They thought they had broken your back,
stretched you out on the rack)

Over city and village, orchard and oilfield of
Iraq.

They thought you would knuckle under, accept
your fate and kowtow low

While your oil paid for your slavery, and their
boots pressed you down

Oh what a shock they must have got, when you
stood your ground and fought

And washed with their blood the streets and
alleys of Iraq.

In Ramadi and Najaf, from Fallujah to Baghdad

From hiding they bomb you and shoot innocents
down

But the more they torture and they kill, the
sharper your avenging steel

That slashes and chops them in the alleys of
Iraq.

Oh brothers though we’re strangers born and
grown far apart

And though your name sits awkwardly and strange
upon my tongue

Your war is ours too, this I must make clear to
you

We’re with you in your battle in the streets
and alleys of Iraq.

Brothers, where did you find the strength? I
ask you this

Half in envy and half in tears at your
sacrifice and resolve

Someday will end this violent night, victory
will crown your glorious fight

Tuesday, 20 March 2012

My
grandson snuffled up to me as I lay curled up by the fire, and sniffed
tentatively at my ear. “Grandpa?” he asked. “Are you awake?”

“Even if I weren’t,” I replied, “I am now
that you’ve been poking at me. Can’t you youngsters let me sleep?”

“Grandpa,” the little scamp said, tucking
his tail down mournfully, “If I’d known you were sleeping, I wouldn’t have
disturbed you. But now that you’re awake, you might as well...” He paused,
glancing over his shoulder expectantly.

“Story!” his siblings cheered, all nine of
them. “Tell us a story!”

“Story?” I growled, outraged. “At this time
of night, you want a story? Get back
to sleep at once.”

I glanced across the fire to where my
daughter was lying, watching us with an amused eye. “You know where it’s going
to end, Dad,” she said. “Since you’re as eager to tell them a story as they are
to listen, why not just do it and get it over with?”

“You have no soul,” I grumbled. “You don’t
appreciate these things. They set the tone for the story, don’t you see?”
Shaking my head at this lack of respect for tradition, I turned to the kids.
They were all gathered in a semicircle of little red tongues, panting with
eagerness, and cold wet noses. “OK,” I capitulated, and waited until the chorus
of excited yelps had subsided. “What kind of story do you want?”

“Tell us how you got to be with the Man,
Grandpa,” one of my granddaughters said before anyone else could shout a
suggestion. “You said a few stories back that you’d tell us, but didn’t.”

“All right,” I said, and raised an
admonitory paw at the chorus of protests. “None of you can agree on what you
want, anyway, so since she spoke before anybody else did, she wins.”

“It’s not fair,” the grandson who had
sniffed at me whined. “She always gets in first. It’s not fair!”

“Do you want a story or don’t you?” I
asked. My daughter, on the other side of the fire, scratched at a flea,
grinning happily as her kids swarmed around me. She does enjoy palming them off
on me whenever she can.

“Listen to Grandpa,” she said. “If you want
a story from him, sit quietly and listen.”

So, when they had finally quietened down, I
sat up, looked them over sternly, and began.

************************

I first
met the Man when I was still a very young puppy, just opened my eyes and far
from weaned. My mother wasn’t as privileged as you; she lived on the street and
gave birth on the pavement. And we had to huddle next to her for warmth,
without a fire like this one. You don’t know how privileged you are, you don’t.

So, one day when I was suckling at my
mother’s breast, a shadow suddenly fell over me, and a voice squealed, “Oh,
just look at them!”

Of course, back then I didn’t understand
any Human, and in fact I’d never been so close to a human before, so I squeaked
in terror and almost let go of my mom’s teat. But I had enough of a memory to
be able to understand, in retrospect, what they were talking about.

“They’re so cute,” this voice went on, its
owner looming over us. “Let’s take one, please?”

“Don’t get so close,” someone else said
warningly. “The mother will get anxious and might bite.” Which showed how
little they knew of my mother, who had never bitten even a flea.

“But, dad,” the first voice took on a
whining quality, which I was to grow so used to in later months, “I want one.
Please.”

“Look, son. If you must have a dog, we’ll get you a pedigree puppy, a Labrador or
something. Not a common mongrel like this.”

“I don’t want a pedigree Labrador. I want
one of these.” And, before I could
even whine a protest, this young villain had snatched me up, literally from my
mother’s breast, and put me inside his smelly jacket. Even now, remembering the
smells inside it, I feel like throwing up.

What do you mean, didn’t I try to get away?
Of course I did. I whined and wriggled and kicked, but all it did was make him
clutch me tighter, until I was afraid that he’d crush me to death. So I stayed
quiet until he took me out and almost dropped me on a hard floor, slippery and
cold. Someone gave me a saucer of milk, which I lapped at because I was so
tired and thirsty, and then I fell asleep.

I don’t recall the next few days too well. I
do remember a lot of shouting at the mess I was making, and at how I was
whining all the time. Well, of course
I was whining – I was missing Mom, wasn’t I? But who even cared about that?

Not the young twerp who’d picked me up, I
can assure you. He just whined that I was his, and he wanted to play with me.
Since his idea of “play” was to tie a string round my neck and pull me along,
this wasn’t exactly something that made me happy, and when I protested by
digging my paws in, he only pulled me along harder. I have no idea why he’d
even picked me up in the first place, unless I was just another toy to him. He
had a lot of toys, which he usually got tired of in short order.

No, of course he wasn’t the Man. You know the Man well; do you think he could ever
have been like that young idiot?

As I grew old enough to start taking solid
food, I was no longer allowed in the house much – the kid’s mom didn’t like
dogs – so I was tied up in the yard a lot, in all kinds of weather, with only a
sack to lie on. They didn’t even give me a kennel, not even a packing crate, so
for all intents and purposes I’d have been better off on the street. And the
kid began coming out less and less to “play” with me.

You understand what was happening? I was a
toy, and he was getting tired of me.

I’d begun to understand Human pretty well
by then, and I could hear them arguing over me, the dad and mom, when their son
was at school or out playing with friends.

“You’d best get rid of that ugly brute,”
the mom would say. “I can’t stand the sight of the dirty beast.”

“How do you suggest I get rid of him?” the
dad would answer. “I can’t give him away, can I? Nobody wants a mongrel like
that. Just look at him.”

“I don’t care – just take him where you
found him and leave him there. He’s from the gutter, he’ll go back to the
gutter.”

“But you know dogs. The cur probably thinks
of our house as his home. He’ll find his way back and be here in a day or two.”

“Well, then? Take him to the vet and get
him put to sleep.”

Now, at that time I had no idea what a
‘vet’ was, but I didn’t at all like the suggestion that I be taken to one, and
I had a strong suspicion that ‘sleep’ wasn’t what it sounded like. I was
relieved to hear the dad demur.

“No, I don’t really like the idea of killing the animal – it’s not really his
fault – and besides the vet’s expensive. Let me think about it.”

What he thought of, I can only surmise,
because two days later he told me to get into his car. This was something that
had only happened a time or two before, and which I considered rather a treat, so
I jumped into the car, quite happy to be out of that tiny yard. We drove for
quite a while, until the city had vanished and there were trees all around.
Then the dad stopped the car and opened the door.

“There, boy,” he said, “go have a run
around.”

I didn’t need a second invitation. I was
out of the car and trotting along the road, smelling at all the wonderful scent
tracks I’d never come across before, things I couldn’t even identify. Some of
those scents I can’t even name to this day, old as I am; I have no idea what
they might be.

I ran and trotted until I was tired, and
then I turned round and came back to the car, because I didn’t like the idea of
leaving the dad so long without me, even though I was enjoying myself so much.

You know what I found, don’t you? There was
no car there.

It’s strange to think of it now, but at the
moment it never struck me that he’d gone and left me alone. For a fairly long
time I ran up and down that road, looking for the car, imagining that perhaps I’d
been mistaken about where it was. But no, I could track my own scent trail all
the way to the mix of rubber, oil, and the dad himself that marked the place
where the car had been. At last I had to admit it – the car had gone.

Being so young yourselves, even younger
than I was then, you have no idea of how terrible it feels to be alone – really
and completely alone. I had always
been with a pack; my mother and siblings and then the dad and mom and the boy.
Well, they were better than no pack at all – but now I was completely alone.

Well, children, you should understand that even
a young dog isn’t completely helpless in this situation. After I had shaken off
my initial panic, I began to think of what to do. Now, I’d never seen a car go
anywhere but on the roads. Cars did not cross fields and forests. Since the car
had not passed me, obviously it had gone the other way, down the road. Therefore,
I should follow it down the road, and it would take me back to the dad, and mom
and the boy.

Maybe you’re surprised that I should want
to be back with them? You aren’t old enough to know the call of the pack. Even
though they’d abandoned me, and treated me so badly, they were still the pack,
and my place was with them. Don’t laugh – you aren’t old enough to know what I’m
talking about.

Anyway, I began on my way down that road. It
was a long, weary walk, and I was getting hungry and tired. I was still very
young, and less than half-grown, and I’d never walked so far before. A couple
of times I stopped to slake my thirst from roadside puddles, but the water
smelt and tasted foul.

By the time evening came, I was utterly
exhausted and still trudging down the road, and nowhere had I seen a house. And
then I came to a place where several roads intersected.

You understand my problem, don’t you? I
hadn’t the faintest idea which way to go. Smelling the road didn’t do any good,
because it was covered with tracks of rubber and oil, any of which might be the
car.

I was still trying to decide which way to
go when there was a terrible noise and something struck me hard and sent me
flying through the air. I didn’t even begin to feel pain before I lost
consciousness.

When I woke, I hurt all over, with a sort
of pain I’d never known. I was lying on a soft surface and a man in a white
coat was leaning over me.

“He’s awake,” he said, as I whined. “That’s
something, anyway.”

There was something in his tone I’d never
heard before, but which I know now to be sympathy and kindness. Nobody in the
boy’s family had shown me any such thing. But I didn’t know what it was, and in
any case I was still whining with the pain.

No, he wasn’t the Man. But he was the first
human ever to be anything resembling nice to me.

“Looks like he was struck by a car,” he
said, passing his hands over my body. “It doesn’t really look like he has much
of a chance.”

“Does he have a chance at all?” someone
else said from behind me. The voice was harsh, as if the speaker’s throat had
been rubbed with sandpaper, so unlike the smooth tones of the boy’s family that
I had difficulty understanding what he’d said. “Any hope he can be saved?”

“There’s always a hope,” said the man in the white coat. “He’s badly injured, but he’s
still very young, so there’s a chance of healing. But it’s not going to be so
easy.”

“I’ll be glad to pay,” said the person with
the rough voice. “I’m not rich, but I’ll pay whatever it takes.”

The man in the white coat looked across me
curiously. “May I ask why you’re doing this?” he enquired. “He’s not your dog.
You said that you found him on the highway, didn’t you?”

“Yes, that’s right. He’s not my dog. As to
why – let’s just say I have my own reasons; things I don’t want to talk about.”
He paused. “Will you do it?”

The man in the white coat raised his
eyebrows. “Of course I will. That is if
he can be saved. And don’t worry about the money.” He turned away for a moment
and returned with something glittering in his hands. I felt a pressure on my
leg, and a sharp pricking pain. “He’ll have to stay here while he recovers,
though...if he does.”

“I understand.” The rough voice sounded
fainter, blurred. The room began to spin and turn hazy.

“Are you going to wait, or come back later?”
the man in the white coat asked. “It’s going to take a while before I can tell
you anything.”

As from a great distance I heard the rough
voice. “I’ll wait.”

That was the start of a very uncomfortable time
for me. When I woke again, I could scarcely move my right foreleg because there
was a heavy, hard and white cast that extended from my paw to nearly up to my
shoulder. I also had a strange feeling in my thigh and belly, as though my skin
had been pulled together tightly, and it smelt strange. But I couldn’t lick it
because I had a heavy collar on, with a projection which limited how far I
could turn my head. It was maddening, I tell you. Worse than having a flea in a
spot you just can’t scratch, day after day.

Every day the rough-voiced person would
come and talk to the man in the white coat, and I heard that I was getting
steadily better. I got to know that the man in white was a “vet” like the one
to whom the boy’s mom had wanted me to be sent, to be “put to sleep” – but whatever
that meant, obviously it hadn’t happened to me.

I still remember the day that heavy hard
object was cut off my arm and shoulder. I felt immediately as if I was one of
those birds you stupid puppies chase around in the mornings – I felt so light
and free. And the day after that, the rough-voiced man came and picked me up,
holding me up to his face so I could lick it.

You’ll have realised by now who he was; it
was the Man, of course. Back then he looked almost the same as he does now,
except that he was maybe a shade scruffier and smellier, but those smells were
as rich and interesting as they are now. You’ve all smelt him, so you don’t
need me to describe them to you.

“Well, well,” he said to me, and rubbed his
nose on mine. “So you decided not to die on us, huh? Well, come along, then.”

At that time he lived in a sort of cabin, a
single-roomed little house out in the woods, and there he took me and shared his
meals with me. I wasn’t completely healed yet, but as I ran along beside him each
day I could feel myself getting stronger.

“You just get yourself fully healed,” the
Man would tell me at least once a day, “and we’ll see about finding your real
owner.”

I surmised that by “owner” he meant the boy
and his family, and of course I had no longer any desire to go to them. Nor did
I really think the Man himself had any real wish to send me off to someone whom
he had never seen; it was obvious that he kept telling me that because he felt
himself yearning to keep me, but at the same time feeling he shouldn’t. He’s
honest as the day is long, for a human.

But I got to know that he had problems,
too. Humans, you know, don’t live quite as we do; they work at “jobs” to earn
something called “money”, but the Man had no job any longer and almost none of
this money, and he had to move elsewhere until he could find a job. No, don’t
ask me to explain – old as I am, I still haven’t quite understood it all. And
he was afraid he couldn’t take care of me.

“I can’t even pay for your shots and
licence, boy,” he told me once, fondling my ears, while I chewed his shoelaces.
“It wouldn’t be fair to you, don’t you know.”

But I was too busy getting better to think
much on that, and it was with great surprise that one day I saw the Man putting
a new collar and a leather leash on the table.

“Can’t put it off any longer, boy,” he
sighed. “Tomorrow, I’m taking you into town. We’ll check with the Society for
the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals people if anyone’s posted you missing. If
not, I’ll have to see if anyone will adopt you.” And, hugging me to him so
tightly that I wriggled, he buried his face in my fur and began to cry.

That night it rained heavily, with thunder
rumbling loudly overhead, so loudly that it made the cabin’s walls tremble. I
wasn’t sleeping too well, in any case, because of the knowledge that it was my
last night with the Man, and I knew he wasn’t sleeping well, either, because he
muttered and moved in his bed.

Suddenly, between the claps of thunder, I
heard another noise. It was a clicking sound, like metal on glass, and a
scraping, followed by a small tinkle. It woke me up completely at once. The
room was completely dark, but I could make out the noise was coming from near
the window. And, as I listened, it came again, followed by a creaking noise, as
though someone was forcing the window slowly open.

I was about to bark as loud as I could at
this disturbance, but something told me that I’d do better to be cautious. I
can’t really say what made me crawl to the Man and poke urgently at his hand
with my nose – whether it was the stealthy, quiet noise at the window, or the
strange and rank smell that invaded my nostrils. Whatever the reason, I nuzzled
the Man’s hand with increasing urgency, and – when he showed no sign of
reacting – took his palm between my teeth, and nipped him hard.

With a yell so loud that it startled me
into scooting under the bed, the Man jumped up and turned on the light – and then
he shouted even louder. And from near the window, someone shouted as well.

From under the bedspread, I poked my nose
out enough to see what was happening. The window was open, and, standing beside
it, soaking wet, was a young man in black clothes with a wild look in his eyes
and a large knife in his hand. He began stepping slowly towards the Man.

“Look here,” the Man said, and I could
smell caution on him, but no fear. “What do you want?”

“Nothing,” the wet young man said, in a
high giggling voice. “Just a little bit of fun.” I could smell the fear on him,
all right; fear and something else I couldn’t identify, a mixture of odours I’d
call the stink of craziness. He raised the knife. “Do you like fun,” he asked. “Huh?”

The next moment I’d thrown myself out from
under the bed and leaped for the knife. I think that if I’d thought about it, I
would have stayed where I was, tucking my tail under my belly in abject terror,
but I didn’t think about it – not then. I leaped for the knife, and the wet young
man began turning towards me, but too slow; and an instant later my teeth were
sinking into his wrist, and the knife was on the floor.

You know the Man is big and strong, but I
don’t think you quite realise how
strong. He picked up the screaming wet young man with one hand and slammed him
against the wall over and over until he stopped screaming. Then he opened the
door and threw him out into the night.

“We’ll go and talk to the police tomorrow
morning,” he told me, as he shut the window and pushed his cupboard across it. “If
that junkie tries to get treated for that bite, he’s toast.”

Then he came to me and picked me up and
held me to him, and I licked his face frantically as he kissed me again and
again.

***********************

“And that’s the way it was,” I said. “We couldn’t find any trace of
the wet young man in the morning. The rain had continued all night and washed
away the smell. Even the blood had been washed off the ground.

“The Man and I went to the police and he
reported what had happened. The policeman asked whose dog I was, and after the
briefest pause the Man said I was his. And then I knew it would be all right.”

“So you were the hero?” the grandson who’d
nuzzled me asked sleepily. He wasn’t the only one who seemed to be getting
drowsy. “Did he give you a medal, Grandpa?”

“Worse,” I said. “He gave me his love and a
home, which means, in the fullness of time, he gave me you lot. Now go to
sleep.”

My daughter had already fallen asleep on
the other side of the fire, as I’d expected. She’s a sweet bitch, but she never
could manage to sit through most of my stories.